Monday, 24 February 2014

According
to Anna Massey’s memoir, Telling Some Tales,
it was a bit easier to pass your driving test in 1955. ‘My examiner was a
nervous man who asked me if I knew that I’d driven through a red light,’ Massey
writes. ‘I told him I thought it was green, and he said “Fair enough,” and
passed me.’ (p. 54)

Sunday, 16 February 2014

I
enjoyed Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life,
a series of case studies culled from his quarter of a century working as a
psychoanalyst. They are like surreal short stories that end with insights and
aphorisms, a bit like Raymond Carver crossed with Adam Phillips. In one
chapter, ‘How paranoia can relieve suffering and prevent a catastrophe’, Grosz
writes:

‘Paranoid
fantasies are a response to the feeling that we are being treated with
indifference … they protect us from a more disastrous emotional state – namely,
the feeling that no one is concerned about us, that no one cares. The thought
“so-and-so has betrayed me” protects us from the more painful thought “no one
thinks about me” … It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to
feel forgotten … paranoid fantasies are often a response to the world’s
disregard.’

For
Grosz, what we need most of all – far more than limitless praise or love – is
the sense of being attended to, of being noticed, listened to and worried
about.

I’m
writing a book about shyness, and it occurred to me after reading this that shy
people might be more inclined to paranoia, because they find it harder to make
an impression on the world, and are more likely to feel unnoticed, overlooked,
invisible. But I don’t think I have ever suffered from paranoia. Instead, I
have what seems to me to be – although I suppose I would say this, wouldn’t I? – an entirely rational sense of my own
insignificance.

Friday, 14 February 2014

I’m not really a fan of Valentine’s
Day, but it did make me think of this. In June 1948, Alan Turing and a small
research team at Manchester University persuaded a stored-program computer to
work for the first time. Turing became a proselytiser for artificial
intelligence, believing that this ‘mechanical brain’ would one day be able to
compete on equal terms with a human brain - to the extent that it would be able
write sonnets as well as Shakespeare, although he conceded that the comparison
was ‘a little unfair’ because a sonnet written by a machine would be better
appreciated by another machine. Using the
1951 model of the Manchester computer, nicknamed the Blue Pig, Turing and his
colleague Christopher Strachey created a programme (using algorithms for building
sentences and synonyms for love from Roget’s Thesaurus) that could produce love
letters, such as:

Sunday, 9 February 2014

I’m
not sure why, but in a bored moment I went on Amazon to track all my past
orders, to see if it could tell me something about what I’ve actually been
doing for the last 15 years of my life. I discovered that the first book I
bought on Amazon was on 25 March 1999: Cynthia Ozick’s Fame and Folly. That was back in the days when the internet was
steam-powered and you had to dial it up and it tutted for a bit and then responded
if it felt like it. I bought 13 items in 1999 and things carried on at that
manageable pace for the next few years. As late as 2006, I only put in 11
orders. I must have still been two-timing Amazon with bookshops, an online-shopping
commitment-phobe. I kidded myself that I was a recreational user, that I could
kick the habit any time I wanted. But then things got out of control. I started
buying birthday and Christmas presents and non-books, weird things like
earplugs and hot water bottles. Perhaps the tipping point came when I bought my
first big ticket item, an iPod, on 20 January 2007. There was no going back
from there. Last year I put in 87 orders – and they often included multiple
items. Yes, I am the reason your indie bookshop closed down. It’s my fault that
low-paid workers have to walk 20 miles a day in vast warehouses to fetch my
orders while computers track their every move. I claim to be angry about big companies
employing vast teams of accountants to dodge corporation tax – but as it turns
out, I’m not.

It’s
an evocative and slightly melancholy list. By clicking through the years I can
see my nephew and niece growing up: Doctor Who Sonic Screwdrivers and Harry
Potter Interactive Wands give way to Nintendo Wii games and One Direction
pencil cases. I can see all my brief passions and interests flame up and then fizzle
out. I note that I have bought five USB sticks, as they progressively get lost
or they become bent and decrepit. Every single order I put in, in some small
way, was an investment in the future. I must have thought on some level that it
would make me more knowledgeable, more productive, more interesting to others,
happier.

Last
Thursday, I went to Liverpool’s Bluecoat Arts Centre to see Paul Farley and
Michael Symmons Roberts talk about their book Edgelands. I was pleased to hear they
actually wrote the book together in motorway service stations – something it has
in common with the Meg and Mog books, which were composed by Helen Nicoll and
her illustrator, Jan Pienkowski, at Membury Services on the M4. Their talk
formed part of a series of events tied up with Soft Estate, an exhibition of
the work of Edward Chell and other artists who are interested in motorways, the
areas around them and other types of edgeland.

Soft
Estate is the Highways Agency term for the landscape around motorways and trunk
roads which offers a refuge for wildlife. As long ago as
the late 1960s, conservationists began to realise that the motorway verges
could serve as nature reserves, particularly in the arable south where pasture
was disappearing rapidly. When the M1 was finished in 1967, the conservationist
Michael Way coordinated a botanical survey of the entire roadside verge between
Hendon and Leeds and discovered that, just like the railways, the motorways
were eco-havens. Pollen and seeds hitched a ride on car bumpers or blew along
the wind tunnels created by moving traffic and roadside cuttings. In 1974 the
nature writer Richard Mabey – who contributes an essay to the Soft Estate book
- calculated that there were nearly half a million acres of roadside verge in
Britain, an area of land bigger than the statutory nature reserves. By now the
UK had joined the Common Market and prairie farming was about to grow fat on
European subsidies and the Common Agricultural Policy – so more hedgerows
vanished and nature again retreated to the roadside verges.

In
fact, the roadside verge is really the modern equivalent of the hedgerow –
although it has yet to acquire its Edmund Blunden, the poet and conservationist
who in 1935 misquoted King Lear’s fool to foretell that ‘when there are no more
English hedges, and the expedient of barbed wire has carried the day
everywhere, “There shall the realm of Albion / Be brought to great confusion.”’
We normally think of verges as the motoring equivalent of a
screensaver, an endless green sward interrupted by the occasional abandoned tyre or
stray plastic bag. Yet as Mabey showed, it was part of an ‘unofficial
countryside’ that was valuable almost because it was so unnoticed and unloved.
The roadside was deceptively diverse, cutting through every type of landscape
and geology, and including not only the grass embankments but also the balancing
ponds and settling pools needed to drain the carriageway of rainwater, which
often attracted wildlife. It was the dogged, unlovely nature of the roadside -
from the rare fungi and algae that thrived in the drip-zone under crash
barriers to the wild flowers that flourished on the poor-quality soil of the
verge – that made it ecologically important.

Edward
sent me a copy of the book of the exhibition and there are some beautiful-looking
things in it, including his own paintings of roadside verge plants made with
road dust, and some lovely oil-on-shellac-on-linen paintings of motorway
service stations. I’m still hoping to get along to the exhibition, which has a
couple of weeks left to run. Details are here:

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog